The Problems Of Having Unprotected Thank-You Pages And Download Links

You must learn everything you can about safeguarding your download links if your business involves the sale of digital goods. Otherwise, you might discover that customers download your product for free instead of paying you, which would result in a huge loss for you.

You should have a secure, encrypted link with a clear expiration date that customers must use right away to download your product or receive the downloaded content they purchased within a predetermined window of time (e.g. 72 hours). In this way, you can protect your product from:

a) Illegal sharing between buyers

b) Search engines finding the files and indexing them

c) People finding your thank-you page with all links to download your product

Unprotected Thank-You Pages And Download Links Equals To Loss

If your digital products aren’t protected, there are a lot of ways that they could reduce your profits. Though not every customer would be out to “cheat” you, most people would be delighted to get the product without payment. Some dangers you would prevent

1. Search engine transparency – it is easy to see your products through the search engine and therefore make it available to people to download “legally”. They would not be aware that they are stealing, and you would not be aware that you are losing money. Everything is indexed and crawled by search engines, including software, videos, and ebook (pdf) files.

2. Download sharing: You send a link, and your customer can download it for free or buy it from you even if it has a time limit. You would also need to restrict the number of downloads in order to avoid that. Let’s say you could allow four download attempts and two hours for it to be valid. Before sending the link, you should let the customer know about the security precautions so they can be ready for it. You can easily request the proof of a purchase from a customer if a download time or limit expires and they inform you of this while asking for files to download.

3. The simplest way to hack a digital product is through the Thank You Page Vulnerability. You successfully navigate through the unprotected thank-you page, obtain the url, and download the file. You should implement a download guard that verifies payment has been made before granting access to your e-books or other digital products.

How Can Your Software, Books, and Other Files Be Protected? What Alternatives Exist?

Alternatively you could take the following measures:

1. Change the download site’s domain frequently.

2. Change the page from where the download needs to be done at regular intervals

3. Take the help of encryption to prevent right click copying and exposure of source code

4. Search engines scan only two levels down your domain; try keeping your downloadable product three or four levels down – for example, [http://www.mydomain/directortyA/directoryB/sub-directoryC/mydownload] file

5. Set your e-books in pdf format as these offer you password and protected web location

There are more of these options available, but they are difficult to use and not as effective as they seem. Installing a powerful download guard is the best way to stop this type of theft. You can protect all of your downloadable products with the help of software programs. However, the issue is that such software is expensive, for example. $60 and might take some time to have everything working correctly, so there are better free ways to protect and sell your products online.